1. The Field of the Present Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to a social choice engine for seeking and evaluating responses from members of an online community to a social choice survey posed by a survey administrator.
2. Description of Related Art
With the proliferation of social media websites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, users of such sites have become increasingly interested in the collective knowledge of other online users in regard to a wide variety of topics, including social, business, political, family, and religious issues. This collective knowledge may include the opinions, beliefs, leanings and understandings of the other online users on the social media website. Presently, in order to obtain the collective understanding of other users, the only remedy of a user may be to post a comment with the question on his or her account and wait for responses from the other users. For example, a user of a social media website may wonder if other users of the social media website would recommend a particular restaurant. In this case, the user may post a comment stating “Do recommend Restaurant ABC for Sunday brunch? Please leave a comment if you do.” After posting such a comment, the user may return to the social media website periodically to view comments posted by other users.
While the above approach may gain some limited responses in the form of comments from other users, the approach itself is lacking for several reasons. First, because of the constant stream of postings on social media websites, a user's post that is not viewed immediately is often pushed lower in the stream where it is unlikely to be viewed by later arriving users. Thus, the user's post may only receive a limited number of responses. Second, a user's post may invoke a wide range of responses from other users that are difficult to amalgamate into useful information. That is, a user may not be able to ascertain the overall collective knowledge of the other users because of the uncontrolled nature of the responses. Third, a user may wish to limit responses to only a select group of trusted users, and not the entire community. Fourth, in some situations, other users may not be forthcoming if other users are able to read their posts. Other drawbacks to this approach may exists as well.
The same problems described above may apply to an organization, such as a business, attempting to ascertain the attitudes of its members. For example, a company may desire to determine the attitudes of its employees regarding a topic of importance. In the past, organizations may have sent an organization-wide email to all of its members attempting to ascertain the opinions of its members on the topic of importance. Again, this approach is less desirable as amalgamating the responses may be difficult due to the uncontrolled nature of the responses. Further, it may be difficult to track users who have responded and those who have not responded. This is due to the fact that each user may send back a response that much be individually read, evaluated and amalgamated with the other responses. It may be difficult and time consuming to ascertain a true gauge of the members opinions on a topic of interest.
Users of wireless mobile devices may also be interested in the collective knowledge of other users of wireless devices in regard to a wide variety of topics. For example, a user of a wireless mobile device may desire to ascertain the collective knowledge of contacts stored on the wireless mobile device. Presently, there is no adequate solution for users of wireless mobile devices to ascertain and amalgamate responses from other users of wireless devices.
The prior art is thus characterized by several disadvantages that are addressed by the present disclosure. The present disclosure minimizes, and in some aspects eliminates, the above-mentioned failures, and other problems, by utilizing the methods and structural features described herein. The features and advantages of the present disclosure will be set forth in the following description, and in part will be apparent from the description, or may be learned by the practice of the present disclosure without undue experimentation. The features and advantages of the present disclosure may be realized and obtained by means of the instruments and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims.